


In Plain Sight

by mysterycyclone



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Almost Certainly an AU, Gen, Season/Series 05 Spoilers, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 00:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14580966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysterycyclone/pseuds/mysterycyclone
Summary: Janine finds herself in an awkward position when a contact connected to a former friend calls in a favor during a delicate undercover mission. The favor is simple enough: find and rescue someone from a military compound.It's the target that complicates matters.(Set between S5 and S6! Spoilers up to the end of S5!)





	In Plain Sight

**Author's Note:**

> I only recently finished Mission 8 in Season 6, but this has been sitting in my phone for way too long. I hope you all enjoy!

Janine de Luca stands in a dark, cold room of an abandoned townhome at the edge of some nameless settlement loyal to the Ministry. Thick dust covers wooden floors, and faded wallpaper has begun to peel away from the walls. Outside, an overcast grey sky tapers into darkness as the sun sets, and quiet murmuring conversation can barely be heard from the townspeople as they drift towards their homes, occasionally interrupted by the sharp bark of an order from a Ministry soldier. The road eventually goes silent, and Janine shifts her weight slightly, checking her watch. Her contact should be here anytime. He’s always been prompt.

 

The wind cuts through a broken window on the second floor, sending a draft down the stairs and into the kitchen where she has a small lamp set, hidden from the windows and set to the dimmest setting. The flame inside flutters, then steadies and Janine adjusts her mask to better cover her nose. It's one very similar to the style Simon had used years before. She isn’t exactly a fan of the masks. They’re a risk, these days. Sigrid has made any sort of face covering illegal for those outside of her cult of loyalists, with harsh penalties against anyone who even dares cover their nose with a scarf in chill weather. Janine personally finds them terribly impractical in most situations. Her peripheral vision is stunted, her nose blocked, and to be completely frank, she’s not fond of breathing in her own breath. But they are necessary for the few face to face meetings Janine must have with the few Netrophil loyalists left. It’s imperative none of her contacts see her face, and equally important that she sees all of theirs. More than a few have balked at this, fearing her to be some sort of Ministry plant meant to pull them out of hiding. Those are the ones she trusts the most. Which doesn't account for much.

 

Her agents run the gamut between genuine crackpot theorists and delusional anarchists from the early days of Netrophil’s mailing list, to people acting as spies placed throughout various government agencies, to a careful few operatives that Janine is confident enough to send out on sabotage or intelligence gathering missions. The man she's meeting today, David Lawson, is one of the latter. He's a veteran Netrophil agent who had worked with previous Jerrys in the past. He’s been a useful asset so far, though Janine is sparing in her use of his talents. Five’s disastrous mission into Abel has made her hesitant to send others into danger against Sigrid; not everyone has Five’s luck, and there are only so many lives she wants on her conscience.

 

There’s a noise at the door, and Janine snaps out of her thoughts, hand tightening around the handle of her machete. It isn’t a zombie; the dead don’t  _ sneak _ .

 

David slips inside the townhouse, and stands still to let his eyes adjust to the sudden dark, almost stumbling into the table Janine is standing behind. There’s only one lamp on inside the house, set to the dimmest possible setting. Janine quickly looks him over, and relaxes. He came alone and unarmed, as she asked. That didn’t mean he was harmless by any means, but Janine is confident in her ability to handle matters if he turns out to be a traitor.

 

David Lawson is a tall, middle aged man with the sort of broad shoulders and arms you’d find on someone who has worked a physical trade for most of their adult life. Dark hair peeks out from under an old Army patrol cap, and a thick black beard covers the lower half of his face. His brown eyes are sharp, and constantly move around the room, searching for danger, and he carries himself with a tense sort of grace, balanced and ready to strike out to defend himself at a moment’s notice. He reminds Janine of a construction foreman, the sort of man who thrived off of heavy physical labor rather than a desk job inside an office. 

 

He glances around the small room, searching the corner and the seams of the wallpaper for hidden cameras or microphones. When he finds none (Janine had been sure to disable any she  _ did  _ find), he relaxes by the slightest margin, and pulls something from his pocket, holding it gently and protectively in his right hand. It isn’t a weapon--too small, too light, no visible edges. Janine can’t quite get a good look at it from behind her mask, but she thinks it might be a photo.

 

“You’ve spent quite a bit of time convincing me to see you face to face, Mr. Lawson,” Janine says, pitching her voice lower than normal. Her acting skills aren’t quite up to par, all things considered, but they would suffice for this short meeting. Tom’s always been better at playing a part, truthfully. 

 

“I did,” David nods, reaching up to scratch under his hat. He hesitates again, looking lost and slightly nervous. His hand clenches briefly before he forces it to loosen, relax. He sighs, gathering courage perhaps, and then starts to speak. “It’s important. And I think you’ll agree. I hope so, anyway.”

 

Janine would rather he simply come out and say it. Time is of the essence these days, and each passing minute could lead to an opportunity she can ill afford to lose. She nods, “You have my attention, Mr. Lawson.”

 

He relaxes by the slightest margin, then begins to speak. “Before all this nonsense with the Ministry began, I was in charge of a settlement. A pretty big one, inside a small city that’s in the middle of the Ministry territory now, blocked up by those walls.” He points at one of the maps Janine has laid out on the table, directly on top of a small city in the middle of an area marked out in blood red. “We had runners, about thirty-two of them, just enough to keep us going. We all lived in this block of flats near the center of old town.”

 

He pauses, as if unsure of where to go from there. Janine watches him silently from behind her mask, wondering what this has to do with her and, by extension, Netrophil. She’s tempted to demand he get to the point, but forces herself to stop. Yes, her time is precious, and yes, she can’t easily afford to fall behind on her plans, but David is clearly nervous, and a sharp tongue might send her out of his good graces for good. That’s not something she can afford at the moment. His intelligence reports are crucial for her operation. She keeps her peace, and after a few moments have passed, David starts to speak again.

 

“The thing is, we had  _ no idea _ what was happening out in the wider world, you know? The radio towers were taken over by this damn gang, and we didn’t have access to Rofflenet because of it,” he says, rambling some. “We didn’t know about Abel or the Ministry,  _ anything _ , until the Ministry started herding zombies into the city to build up their Neutral Zone. They caught some of my people. Took them off to this compound in Ministry territory. I found it. I know where they're holding at least one of my people.”

 

He sets a picture in the pool of light on the table between them, but maintains eye contact with Janine. There’s desperation in his voice when he speaks. “Please, Jerry. I’m begging you. Just this one favor for me, alright? Help me get her out of there. I’ll do anything for you after that.”

 

Janine resists the urge to sigh. She isn’t unsympathetic towards the man and his predicament, but she doesn’t have the resources or time to dedicate to rescuing every individual her agents have lost to the Minister’s secret police. It just isn't feasible. And assuming she  _ did _ find them in one of Sigrid’s prisons (not a simple task in the slightest, there are so many), they were often in no shape to endure an escape. If they’ve even survived their first month of captivity, that is.

 

But perhaps she could keep an eye out for the woman during her next operation at one of the Minister’s political prisons. David is a solid, loyal agent, and everyone’s service comes with a price. He deserves this much effort, she supposes. She looks down at the picture--and sucks in a breath.

 

The picture is small, faded in some parts, and crinkled in others. A man and a woman are in front of a small, modest house in a suburb that could exist anywhere in England. The woman has the man in a loose headlock and is ruffling his hair. They’re both laughing in the sunlight, and a small, ancient looking dog watches them with a curious headtilt in the background. A small note is scribbled at the bottom of it in an all too familiar hand.

 

_ Good luck at uni, sis! I’m going to miss you! -Sam _

 

Sam Yao looks as he did before the weight of an apocalypse settled on his shoulders. Bright eyed and beaming, with no trace of the worry lines or dark bags under his eyes that Janine had grown used to seeing over the years. He’s a bit softer at the edges, and his hair is missing the premature flecks of gray at his temples, but it's unmistakably him. It’s one of the better pictures she’s seen of him, and she thinks Dr. Myers and Runner Five would quite like to see this picture of him.

 

The young woman beside him shares the same facial features as her older brother. She’s shorter than him, with her head just reaching over his shoulders, and Sam has to bend slightly to avoid being pulled off balance by her rough housing. She’s wearing a red hoodie to go with Sam’s orange, and her dark hair flows freely down her shoulders. There’s a sharp confidence to her eyes and grin that sets her apart from her brother. Janine can tell that this is a woman sure of who she is and her place in the world.

 

Janine reaches out and picks up the picture, holding it carefully. She studies it for a long moment, her mind racing. Sam has mentioned his sister before, of course. He’d searched Rofflenet high and low for any news of her those first few months at Abel, and occasionally searched in the years following, especially after Sara was born. He had no luck, and quietly stopped shortly before the Ministry took over Abel. He said it wasn’t healthy to dwell on what might have happened to her, that no good would come of it.

 

“Her name is Amber,” David says quietly, drawing Janine out of her thoughts, “Amber Yao. She was one of my runners. The best one we had.”

 

“What happened to her?” Janine asks, turning to look at the back of the picture. There’s a doodle of a dog lounging in a jacuzzi with cucumber slices over its eyes on the back. A small sentence is scrawled beneath it.  _ Very comfort, much relax.  _ Janine is surprised at the wave of nostalgia and annoyance seeing that doodle inspires within her. Hazy, half forgotten memories of scolding Mr. Yao for returning reports full of doodles in the margins echo in the back of her mind. She has to fight the urge to ask David to keep the photo.

 

“We had to evacuate the city when they started building that damn wall,” David says, adjusting his hat. “Amber was on decoy duty, drawing the hordes away from our people. The Ministry had soldiers in the city, and they caught up to her. I thought she’d been killed by the zombs until that last report from your contact inside the compound.”

 

The guilt in his eyes makes it difficult for her to maintain eye contact, and she instead focuses on the photograph. She never was much good at giving comfort, but she sympathizes with him on some level. Losing a runner had always felt like a failure to her, a mark against her leadership, though she knew that was the price of it. It had been different when she was with MI6. Those were professionals who had chosen that life; their deaths had been easier to weather. 

 

Until Tom.

 

“They’ve had her in that place for weeks, maybe longer,” David says, tired and desperate. “Please, Jerry. Help me get her out of there. We can’t leave her there.”

 

Janine slowly sets the photograph down on the table between them, her mind racing. She can’t risk sending a message to Abel to tell them what she’s found. Her cover must be maintained until she accomplishes her mission. And it is highly unlikely they would be able to safely travel through the Neutral Zone to retrieve Ms. Yao  _ and  _ take her back to Abel territory without significant losses.

 

Depending on her state, it is entirely possible Amber Yao may not be capable of enduring such a trip. Janine had seen the state of Abel’s residents when Ian Golightly had taken over. The starved, beaten down husks of the people she had taken in. And those people had been  _ unimportant _ to Sigrid. The thought of what would happen to someone related to the Ministry’s Most Wanted was harrowing, almost enough to get her to grind her teeth.

 

Beneath all of this is a feeling of frustration. Her plans are time sensitive, a deadly game of cat and mouse against a woman more brutal and terrifying than anyone Janine has faced before. This diversion would set her back by weeks, at the least. Possibly longer.

 

But she can’t bear the thought of leaving the young woman there, either. God only knows what tortures Sigrid is putting her through, assuming she hasn’t sent the woman off to Finland already. That is a fate she wouldn’t wish on anyone, much less on someone related to one of her friends. Being held by Sigrid is torture enough. Janine knows that from painful experience.

 

She can’t ignore this. She’d never forgive herself for it. Sam wouldn’t either. Her plans will simply have to be put on hold for now.

 

“Very well, Mr. Lawson. I’ll do what I can. First, you’ll need to tell me about this compound.”


End file.
